Secondment experiences

Sam BarnettOctober 2013Novel fluorescent proteins for super- resolution imaging in vivo Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico29 April - 15 May 2016

"My PhD project is based around developing super-resolution on photosynthetic organisms and utilising fluorescent proteins from these organisms as novel STORM dyes. As part of this I had been invited to visit Jeri Timlin’s group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico between 29th April and the 15th May 2016. Rather than being an academic lab the group is part of a US national laboratory so it is more of an industrial setting. The idea behind the visit was to look at a range of Synechocystis mutants that we have under their hyperspectral microscope to look for differences in the photosynthetic apparatus. In addition we were going to attempt STORM imaging on the mutants which had various components of their photosynthetic apparatus labelled with yellow fluorescent protein, however due to the autofluorescent nature of the cells this proved difficult. I also took along some strains of dual-labelled E. coli for imaging on their multicolour TIRF-STORM microscope, this imaged really well and we are hoping to get some good data from it. I gave a talk on my past work to a few of the groups at Sandia and I also took the opportunity to give a talk in San Diego where one of my supervisors (Dr Ashley Cadby) is on a visiting professorship."

This exchange was funded by a grant from PARC (The Photosynthetic Antenna Research Centre).